This mail was buried in another thread so I lifted it here.
In a marketing sense the name Free Pascal Compiler Lazarus is really poor.
There could be a new name covering both these projects. Free Pascal Compiler
and Lazarus would be its sub-projects. That would be in marketing sense only,
it wouldn't affect the the development process anyhow.
Even Delphi changed the language name from Object Pascal to Delphi, for
marketing reasons and to avoid confusion.
Both Free Pascal Compiler and Lazarus are less known than Delphi and the name
beast Free Pascal Compiler Lazarus is confusing, really.
Now I also realize how outdated the word Free in Free Pascal Compiler is.
In marketing sense it is not a good name.
Regards,
Juha Manninen
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Paul van Helden wrote:
Martin wrote:
I don't see why changing the name. Any Name except for Pascal
RAD-IDE needs branding = users have to learn to associate it with a
pascal RAD-IDE.
Well, perhaps there are other people that are having the same experience
as myself: When people ask me what I use for developing my software the
answer is usually Free Pascal Lazarus. The response is aways a
puzzled look or a pause on the other end of the phone line, but my
concern is that it doesn't even sound cool. A puzzled+mildly_impressed
look would be so much better than a puzzled+what_is_this_guy_smoking?
look. There are so many cool sounding programming languages out there,
like Python or Ruby on Rails (check their website for a simple and
to-the-point extremely newbie friendly home page:
http://rubyonrails.org/). When you say Free Pascal Lazarus, someone
who knows a little about computer science will immediately think of an
old teaching language that nobody uses (well, that's what they think)
but the rest would have forgotten the word Pascal whilst digesting the
word Lazarus. Hmmm, wasn't that some dude mentioned in the Bible?.
The symbology of some project raised from the dead will be lost on
most people, I think, and perhaps that is a good thing. Who cares if the
project was once dead? What matters is that it is now an incredibly
lively project! Besides, there might be many people in this community
who objects to that part of written history...
Perhaps my problem is with the separation of the IDE and the language. I
don't say Object Pascal Delphi. The word Delphi serves as a
complete description to those who know what it is, while sounding mildly
cool to those who don't have a clue. (In fact, it seems many people who
have heard of both Delphi and VB think that the former is some kind of
clone of the latter!). People who don't know much about Delphi, don't
associate it with Pascal, they just have this vague idea that it is that
VB-like thing that is a bit cooler and can create apps faster. Then also
the word Free. Aren't nearly all (cool) programming languages free? In
English, as you know, it is unfortunate that free is used more in the
beer context than in the speech context. It simply doesn't sound cool
anymore. Furthermore, I don't think the current $modes supported by FPC
can be called Pascal anymore. They are far removed Pascal-like dialects,
a bit like Afrikaans that originated from Dutch, 300 years ago, and used
to be called Kitchen Dutch. That might as well have been Free
Dutch... At least Object Pascal implies that the original Pascal
language was heavily modified. Free implies no such thing.
Why this heavy emphasis on exterior appearances (ie. being cool)? all
the uber geeks might ask. It is important because most decision makers,
clients and users are not geeks. These people need to feel good about
the money they are spending. I believe a large part of Oracle's success
can be attributed to the really cool name. (What an amazingly cool name
for such a c...@p database, and don't tell me Delphi wasn't inspired by
Oracle). Just look around you and see all the billboards with pretty
people on them. This is the society we live in, like it or not. I don't,
but if we want to be anti-establishment, why not just change the name to
something really horrible and spell it with all small caps.. like
git. (ouch)
Just my 2c :-)
--
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